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A New 21st-Century Job: The Media Mentor

Two books out this fall help to define this new type of educator

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Oct. 24, 2016

New job descriptions are born in the wake of new technologies. The emergence of book-making brought us more than jobs for creating and selling books—it also led to the emergence of book reviewers and librarians to make sense of and categorize them. The arrival of automobiles led to highway planners, auto-safety experts, and the testers behind Consumer Reports. Airplanes brought us air-traffic controllers, and on it goes.

Now, as humankind absorbs two decades with the Web and one decade of touchscreens and on-the-go Internet, many new positions are taking shape, one of which could have a significant impact on how children and their families learn: the media mentor.

In Donohue’s book, 28 writers with backgrounds in early childhood education and family engagement explain the need for mentorship and show what it can look like across a variety of settings, in libraries, homes, child care and pre-K centers, and schools. In Haines and Campbell’s book, the focus is on youth librarians and media specialists who are already recognized and trained to provide support to families when they search for media (until recently, primarily printed books) that tell stories, impart knowledge, and spark insight.

Over the past decade, as a reporter and research translator, I have watched these roles emerging. With every interview on how media affects children, I’ve relied more and more on these on-the-ground gurus who are helping children and families to make sense of the onslaught of media and new tools. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized how much the educators and librarians I interviewed were truly stretching out into new and yet-unnamed jobs and careers. Meanwhile, in a series of projects here at New America with Michael H. Levine and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, we started finding examples of pioneers in early childhood programs who understood the need for these new roles. The more we saw the complexity of navigating the digital world, the more I could see that these new positions needed a name. “Media mentor” came to my mind, and in a TED Talk for TEDxMid-Atlantic in the fall of 2013, I tested the phrase. A year and a half later, the Association of Library Services for Children, which is part of the American Library Association and has emerged as one of the most forward-thinking organizations in this space, published a white paper that catapulted the issue to the top of their agenda: Media Mentorship in Libraries Serving Youth.

In short, simply relying on technology by itself to help children learn in today’s digital age would be a grave mistake. They need other humans by their side—humans with skill, knowledge, and insight who are tuned into a child’s or parent’s needs and who can help to answer their individual questions about media. As I wrote in an essay for the Donohue book:

“Today’s young children who are using technology to learn and create while working with adults who can set good examples and guide them to new heights are receiving tremendous advantages. If only the privileged few have the opportunity for that kind of tech-assisted but human-powered learning, divides will only grow wider.”

So now the hard work begins. Simply saying “we need media mentors” is not the same as making sure these positions become as ubiquitous as today’s air-traffic controllers or auto-safety experts. They will need an infrastructure that supports their emergence around the country and ensures they become part of the fabric of 21st century education.

Big questions are now emerging on exactly who these people are, what fields they should hail from, what training they need, who exactly they are mentoring (children or families or educators who work with children and families?), and what exactly they are guiding people to do (are they helping parents and children to be choosy, are they modeling what it looks like to have a socially interactive and parent-child engagement with new media, are they teaching youth how to use new tools to create things, are they focused on how to use search engines and digital libraries?).

In the final chapter of Family Engagement in the Digital Age, Michael Levine and I offer recommendations for how to build a policy and research infrastructure to support these efforts. Watch for a summary of that chapter in an upcoming blog post.